Summary

As of Java SE 8, java compilers are required by reasonable
interpretations of the Java Language Specification to issue
deprecation warnings when a deprecated type is imported by name or
when a deprecated member (method, field, nested type) is imported
statically. These warnings are uninformative and should not be
required. Deprecation warnings at actual uses of deprecated members
should remain.

Goals

The goal of this JEP is to facilitate making large code bases clean of
lint warnings. The deprecation warnings on imports cannot be
suppressed using the @SuppressWarnings annotation, unlike uses of
deprecated members in code. In large code bases like that of the JDK,
deprecated functionality must often be supported for some time and
merely importing a deprecated construct does not justify a warning
message if all the uses of the deprecated construct are intentional
and suppressed.

Non-Goals

It is not a goal of this JEP to actually resolve all the deprecation
warnings in the JDK code case. However, that might occur as part of a
separate maintenance effort in JDK 9.

Description

From a specification perspective, the needed change is small. In JLS 8 the
section on @Deprecated states:

A Java compiler must produce a deprecation warning when a type,
method, field, or constructor whose declaration is annotated with
@Deprecated is used (overridden, invoked, or referenced by name) in a
construct which is explicitly or implicitly declared, unless:

The use is within an entity that is itself annotated with the annotation @Deprecated; or

The use is within an entity that is annotated to suppress the warning with the annotation @SuppressWarnings("deprecation"); or

The use and declaration are both within the same outermost class.

The specification change would be something like adding another bullet
stating the additional exclusion:

The use is within an import statement.

In the javac reference implementation, there would be a simple check
to skip over import statements when looking for deprecation warnings.

Testing

Normal unit tests should suffice to test this feature. A handful of
JCK tests may need to be updated for the changed specification.